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pyatomdb.apec.do_brems does not use all arguments? #43

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eblur opened this issue Oct 6, 2022 · 2 comments
Open

pyatomdb.apec.do_brems does not use all arguments? #43

eblur opened this issue Oct 6, 2022 · 2 comments
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@eblur
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eblur commented Oct 6, 2022

Hi, we are considering using the bremsstrahlung model -- pyatomdb.apec.do_brems -- as a way to model bremsstrahlung emission more generally.

However, we are noticing a few weird things about this functino. First, the Z parameter (Zint in the documentation) is never used in the function.

Additionally, the docstring says that the abund value must be between 0 and 1, but what if we need to calculate bremsstrahlung emission from a super-Solar abundance?

Out of curiousity, what method would you recommend for using pyatomdb to model bremsstrahlung emission from plasmas hotter than 10^9 K?

@jagophile
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Hi Lia,
There is definitely some cruft in there. These functions were ported from early versions and the interfaces have redundancies/ bad documentation. I will leave this open until I remember to clean this up.

As you note, Z is not needed. The abundance can actually be anything, including greater that 1, and should represent the combination of the ion fraction and the elemental abundance (or, as we have implemented it, just set it to 1 in do_brems and multiply these afterwards). Note this is the actual numerical abundance, not the relative to solar values.

As for the high temperature, use the relativistic model. In addition, you should also use the electron-electron brems, calc_ee_brems(E, T, N) which really starts to kick in at these at temperatures, and add the two.

Hope this helps!

@randallksmith
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randallksmith commented Oct 6, 2022 via email

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